From the Shadow into the Light
Sometimes, I feel like a broken record when I say “I have had the most explosive growth in the past few months.” Either my memory fades all too quickly or the rocket ship of my consciousness seems to be constantly accelerating.
Only about six months ago, I wrote “The Golden Arrow of Choiceless Clarity” after the most transformational seven days of my life. I finally understood what “shadow work” really meant: diving into my pride, shame, guilt, anger, and apathy… all the parts of me that I avoided, all the shades of my ego that kept me from my Truth.
When I look back on these six months, I’ve already manifested so much: forming Ceremonia, an entheogenic church, finding and moving into a retreat center, creating and hosting three Ceremonia retreats, and more. Yet, I am now measuring growth by the very thing I use to measure: that I am able to feel more of my feelings, and feel them without creating new guilt or shame in the process.
My journey here has really been a tale of attending transformational retreats and then integrating them into my marriage, vocation, commitments, and spirituality. I learned to create a relationship with my anger in Omani (Costa Rica) in April. I learned that ignorance is the source of all suffering, and I started to make recompense for all that I ignored before. I learned that my pride blocked me from taking responsibility, which is a form of disempowering myself. Whew. What a springboard by which to grow: looking in the mirror at everything I’ve avoided looking at before.
Next, at ISTA (Denver, CO) in June, I learned just how much I treated the feminine with the energy of consumption instead of reverence. I learned how much I gave without consent, generating resentment when I wouldn’t feel validated or appreciated. I learned how to express myself in all of my emotional range. I learned about releasing my anger, unlocking the shame, guilt, grief, or fear underneath the anger iceberg.
In Prisma (Austin, TX) in September, I learned how to create a relationship with my uncertainty. I learned to be fully forward and honest with my feelings; to be congruent between what I was feeling inside with how I expressed outside. My “old way metaphor” representing who I was is “Mirrored Buddha Souvenir” — not quite Buddha, just a cheap souvenir version of him. And my reflective armor would just reflect back other people’s energies, invoking them to inspect their own responsibility without taking any of my own. My “new way metaphor” representing who I am now is “Sensitive Samurai” — an armorless, integrous, skilled, and spiritual warrior who subscribes to a moral code.
In the Circling Immersion (LA) in October, I learned how to create a relationship with helplessness — the deepest forms of my apathy that I would hide from. I peeled back even more layers of being congruent with my truth, to name my agenda instead of sowing distrust or the suspicion of being manipulated. I began to witness my propensity to manipulate, even if it was with good intention.
In the month of October, through numerous challenges with my wife and mother, I learned what feels to be the culmination of six months of shadow work:
My father’s shadow is manipulation and using people for his selfish ends. I have this.
My mother’s shadow is people pleasing, giving without consent, and a savior complex. I have this, too.
With both my mother and father’s shadow combined, I have manipulated people — particularly my wife and mother — to do what I believe to be best for them. I didn’t admit that I am doing so. When they would say “no”, I would push past their “no” justifying that it’s the best for them. I would deny having an agenda, saying that I am only doing this because I care or love them — I am not admitting my own fear, uncertainty, and desire to not feel helpless. I would be a Mirrored Buddha Souvenir.
This past weekend, I experienced under Ayahuasca how much I’ve lived in victimhood, not allowing myself to recognize the erosion of trust over time when my manipulations are felt by others but not admitted by me. I could only imagine just how my wife or my mother must have felt to not be met where they were at: in anger, confusion, and distrust. I could only imagine how it must be to be with a man who could always point the finger back at them in the name of spiritual growth.
I see now how much I’ve used friends, workmates, and family to my benefit while masquerading love or care for them. I didn’t fully understand why I would do this when I truly do feel love for my relationships. Then, I could see it: my selfishness. My egocentrism.
It wasn’t a coincidence that I was listening to Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory just before sitting with Ayahuasca. I could see that my journey is—just as Wilber believes everyone’s journey is—to be acutely aware that each person’s reality is their own. We are experiencing our own reality and the projection of everyone else’s at the same time, and that no one person’s reality is more right, more wrong, or more important than another’s. Everyone is trying their best at all times.
Even these past few days have been a test of this for me. I could feel anger spring up over a financial dispute. Then, a conversation with Ivan Chocron, a modern medicine man I deeply respect and guest of my first podcast, helped me see the assumptions that I show up with and the righteousness inherent in believing my thoughts. When I could let go of the grip of my reality for a moment, I could wear another person’s. Compassion and love flooded into my heart. The anger felt trivial, then — still there, but disempowered because love is so much more powerful of an energy when it is real.
I almost didn’t write this post. I am so glad I did. The deeper I go down the Inner Journey, the more that I see just how simple and more reduced it becomes. It’s all about feeling, embodying, and being Love. But to truly do it, we have to feel all of our own feelings, to fully honor the totality and range of our reality… our human experience. Only then, can we begin to open ourselves to trusting and honoring the range of everyone else’s experience, through the portal of empathy stemming from our own acknowledged experience... this inner knowing that I tried my best and I’ve failed so many times. Everyone else must be trying their best and, in their humanness, failing at loving one another sometimes, too.
